It seems hard to believe now, looking out over Manchester’s burgeoning skyline, but in the early 1990s just a few hundred people wanted to make the city centre their home.

Reversing that trend was top priority for a city leadership desperate to turn around decades of post-industrial decline.

Less than 30 years later, Manchester now faces the opposite problem. How does it sustain the biggest boom seen since Victorian times - in which an astonishing 50,000 people now live in the wider city centre , more arriving every day - without destroying its heart and soul?

The debate about the area’s future, as with Liverpool’s centre, is growing ever louder. As the cranes have moved in, a series of controversial planning decisions have been mulled over. Skyscrapers have sprung up, often absent of affordable housing.

Here and there recognisable landmarks, albeit not necessarily with any official architectural renown, have vanished to make way for new flats and offices.

Weighed against that is the fact Manchester is increasingly achieving its ambition of rebalancing the country out of London. Genuinely it is becoming the place to be, as businesses relocate, its political profile rises and more 18-34-year-olds now arrive each year than leave, according to analysis by the M.E.N’s data unit.

Manchester's skyline is set to change thanks to a raft of new skyscrapers (Image: Rightmove)

So that need to balance Manchester’s character - its essence - with its growth, the need to avoid becoming victim to its own success without turning it into a museum, is becoming one of the hottest topics in town.

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David Ellison, chair of Manchester council’s planning committee, is the first to admit that it is a tough juggling act.

He points out that in the coming years 250,000 people are expected to move into the area sweeping round from the border with Salford to the Etihad stadium , a boom he describes as almost ‘Chinese-style’ in its scale.

But at the same time, Manchester has to ensure it doesn't ruin the very thing that attracts people here in the first place.

“When I was a lad the aspiration was to live in Alderley Edge, but now it’s the city centre,” he says.

Manchester's iconic skyscraper Beetham Tower is surrounded by modern apartments

“It’s great for Manchester, but it creates the pressures you see all around us. The good news is that Manchester is facing its biggest growth since the Victorian era, businesses are relocating, there’s movement of people from the south east coming in and it’s driving jobs.

“How do you balance that very thing that attracts people to Manchester with the pressures that come with the new development, new retail and residential?

“If you are not careful you can destroy the very things that make Manchester such an attractive place.”

He points to the council’s city centre strategy, recently revised, that underpins the direction development will now take, one of several pieces of guidance used by the planning committee when taking decisions.

It outlines the council’s vision for each key neighbourhood from NOMA to Ancoats, First Street to Spinningfields, Oxford Road to Piccadilly, detailing how the city is set to absorb unprecedented demand.

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The need for such a strategy - and the fact it will be revised again in a year’s time - underlines the fact that as London’s property market stagnates, Manchester’s is now flying on the back of lower land prices, more available capital and rising demand.

Just as in Liverpool, which is currently enduring its own row between Unesco and development giants Peel over plans for skyscrapers slap next to the city’s famous docklands landmarks, that throws up tensions.

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It has crystalised a host of questions about skyscrapers, urban design, public consultation and the relative merits of different types of unlisted heritage, all of which are likely to become wider sources of discussion as the city centre grows.

Neville was not available to be interviewed for this piece, but has previously expressed frustration that Manchester is unable to appreciate the merits of new tall buildings next to heritage. In his case much of the public fury has centred on the effects his skyscrapers will have on the nearby Grade I listed Manchester town hall, as well as Central Library, but he points to cities such as London and New York where the two types of architecture sit side by side.

“People in the north, I always hear them say ‘oh London gets everything’,” he told The Times earlier this year.

“But then when you start to bring the types of buildings and operations to Manchester it comes sometimes with complaint and I don’t understand that.

“I get very depressed when people tell me that large modern buildings can’t live next to historic buildings.

“Who will wake up in 10 years and think ‘that development has ruined my life? That development’s really caused me harm’?

“I can’t think of anybody, but I can think of a lot of people who will think ‘I’ve used that development, I’ve lived in there, I’ve used the hotel, I’ve used the public space, the restaurants, the religious centre’.”

“I get very depressed when people tell me that large modern buildings can’t live next to historic buildings' - Gary Neville

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The wider question for many, however, is not whether tall buildings are a bad thing, but how they are designed and where they should go, as well as who they are for.

Lesley Chalmers has worked in development and regeneration for more than 30 years, including as chief executive of the English Cities Fund and on the regeneration of Hulme , alongside legendary former Manchester council chief executive Sir Howard Bernstein. She was one of the first to vocally object to the St Michael’s plans when they were unveiled last year.

A resident of the nearby Great Northern tower, she is at pains to point out that she would have objected regardless.

She believes St Michael’s highlights wider questions about development in the city, including the need to use current investor demand to Manchester’s advantage.

“We now have to think about the quality of the design, because we are in danger of losing both good design and heritage in pursuit of money,” she says.

“It’s the old cliché of the baby with the bathwater: we need to keep that distinctiveness. That now needs to be recognised if we are to stay in front, because if we are just the same as everywhere else, why would people come here?

“Just because there’s a billionaire behind it doesn’t mean it’s the right thing for the city. It’s about boom and downturn.

“We can afford to be much more selective when there’s people queuing up desperate to build houses, but are we?”

Chalmers is part of a growing chorus calling for Manchester to have a tall buildings policy that designates areas suitable for skyscrapers.

These twin 36 storey skyscrapers are set to be built on the old Granada Studios site at Water Street

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In the 1970s and 1980s, planning officials had a rule that nothing higher than the city’s historic Victorian buildings should be built in an attempt to preserve the past, a restriction the city leadership overturned in the 1990s as it sought to usher in investment.

Since the economy recovered from the 2008 crash, some believe the city now needs to tighten up the rules again.

Catherine Dewar, north west planning director for Historic England, formerly known as English Heritage, agrees Manchester ‘absolutely’ needs a tall buildings policy in line with other towns and cities. As development booms here, the body is increasingly assessing proposals that impact on heritage buildings.

“We are having to take more and more judgements on that and we have to understand the impact on the setting of a listing building,” she says, adding that a key part of that is looking at what makes a historic landmark special in the first place.

She uses the Palace Hotel as an example. Historic England objected to plans for new skyscrapers on the neighbouring former BBC site last year, due to the effect they would have on the setting of the Palace, although they were ultimately passed by the council’s planning committee.

“If you take the Palace, why was it designed like that? It was about civic pride and power and wealth, so how would a development effect that element of its significance?” she explains.

“Specifically if you are thinking about setting, what impact would it have on that expression of grandeur and status?”

It isn’t just about listed buildings. How does the city assess landmarks that have other kinds of cultural or social value, such as pubs, bits of artwork, cinemas and former music venues?

Could demolition be on the cards for the former Cornerhouse arts and cinema centre?

On Oxford Street two former cinemas, neither of them the finest architectural example of the road’s silver screen heyday - all of which have arguably already gone - are either vanishing or under threat. The Cornerhouse looks likely to be swallowed up by a new mixed-used development around Oxford Road station, while demolition of the former Odeon began a couple of weeks ago.

Dr Matthew Jones, associate professor of film studies at De Montford University, studied the public’s memories of the area’s cinematic past as part of a project at University College London.

In the 1960s, Oxford Road was where people went to watch movies, often for entire afternoons and evenings at a time, giving its buildings a particular significance.

“Cinemas were very, very beautiful buildings, they were palaces of entertainment,” he says. “They served a democratised function too, because they were cinemas for everyone and signified the importance of cultural entertainment and the importance people placed on cinema in their everyday lives.

“That’s part of that social fabric of that era as much as the architecture, fabulous as it is. So when you knock them down you are not just losing the architecture but the connection between the reasons behind the way the city looks. Cities don’t form by accident, they form around human behaviour.”

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Manchester is ‘bizarre’ in allowing its remaining old cinemas to disappear, he says, at a time when most cities are looking to retain them.

“I think too often we only think about economic value and not human and social value,” he adds.

“It’s very difficult to make visible what a building has meant to a city, compared to saying ‘if we redevelop this it will be worth X millions of pounds’.

“You can’t put a statistic on its meaning to a community.”

The Big Horn sculpture used to be in the Northern Quarter, but was ultimately destroyed to make way for a new housing development

The same could be applied to the loss of smaller landmarks such as the Northern Quarter’s Big Horn sculpture , built in the late 1990s next to Affleck’s Palace as a symbol of the area’s blossoming creative scene. Perhaps equally symbolically, it was condemned to the bulldozers in February when planning was granted for a new block of flats by the property mogul Fred Done.

Recent history is littered with examples of iconic Manchester music venues - the Hacienda, Twisted Wheel - that have been bulldozed in recent years, a theme which cropped up during new mayor Andy Burnham’s campaign earlier this year. Similar debates are raging in cultural centres from east London to Berlin to Brooklyn, places where culture has colonised nooks and crannies before being turfed out by re-development.

The Hacienda nightclub pictured in 1998 has now been demolished

The Twisted Wheel in Manchester, the famous Northern Soul venue (Image: Christine Foster)

Buildings can have a significance that isn’t immediately apparent, he says, one that can often only be teased out by talking to people before finalising plans.

“You don’t need to demolish what’s there if you want to create new space, you can add to it,” he says.

“In some ways if you knock it down you’re destroying a lot of what people actually want to be part of and why people move to Manchester in the first place, its uniqueness.

“Who’s associated with it? It might be because ‘that’s where Joy Division played their first gig’ or whoever. People value that, because if they didn't, they wouldn’t move here.

“It shouldn’t just be about property, it’s about people. If you’re doing well in property it’s often because you understand human behaviour.”

At the same time he worries for the quality of some of the buildings going up in their place.

“Would you really want to or be able to re-purpose them in 100 years? Could it lend itself to a myriad of things? And often the answer is no, I’m not sure it would.

“Are you going to leave a legacy of problems for the future?”

One answer suggested by Heatley and others is a form of ‘social listing’ that would help preserve buildings that don’t meet the criteria for Historic England listing, but which have a particular significance to the community.

But council leader Sir Richard Leese points out a strong dose of pragmatism needs to be applied when weighing up what to keep.

“It’s always been difficult, that’s for sure, to strike a balance,” he says.

“You can maintain heritage in different ways but buildings need to have a purpose, so just keeping a building as a piece of sculpture doesn’t do anybody any good.”

It's a debate also alive within Historic England itself. How long do you allow a buildings to stand empty - London Road Fire Station being a classic example - before giving up and accepting that nobody can be found to take it on?

The demolition of the old Odeon cinema on Oxford Street, Manchester

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To keep the Odeon, a viable end user would have needed to be found, points out Leese, adding: “It’s been closed for about 15 years and nobody has commented on it at all until it started to be demolished.

“I think you occasionally have to test out whether it’s a minority interest and that will vary from building to building.”

Pointing to the Free Trade Hall’s controversial redevelopment in the 1990s, he adds: “There’s a very fine facade that’s been restored, but the rest of it was not a particularly viable 1950s concert hall with poor acoustics.

“There were those who argued it all should have been kept, even though it wasn’t fit for purpose. Simply being a historic building is not in itself a test, because you can maintain heritage without maintaining buildings.”

He vehemently doesn’t believe Manchester now needs a tall buildings policy, adding: “No, I don’t. I think a lot of what the heritage lobby say about tall buildings, say about views, is nonsense anyway.”

Sir Richard is scathing about the behaviour of Historic England regarding the St Michael’s development, to which it has objected on the grounds of ‘substantial harm’ to the setting of the town hall, fuelling national headlines.

In his opinion the way the body has behaved is ‘almost scandalous’, adding: “They gave clear guidance in the pre-planning application stage and its advice on the level of harm later changed significantly.

“Their problem seems to be if you can see big buildings and heritage buildings at the same time and that appears to me to be nonsensical.”

Such debates are not going to go away anytime soon, however.

Previously the M.E.N. has covered the ongoing arguments about the absence of affordable housing in the city centre boom, a row that is also live in London - particularly in the wake of the Grenfell disaster - and a looming question over who the city centre is actually for.

Grenfell Tower in London as it now stands (Image: PA)

Grenfell has further brought the human element of cities into sharp focus, believes Lesley Chalmers.

“What is the city but its people?” she asks, quoting the Manchester International Festival’s 2017 slogan. “It’s not the fault of the council that planning law is so restrictive but the council can take a view to look at things more widely and with more thought.”

At the same time social media is transforming the way campaigns are pursued on individual city centre issues.

From Change.org to campaigning groups such as Friends of London Road Fire Station or Manchester Shield, the group that grew out of it, it's now a lot easier to be a thorn in the council’s side when it comes to controversial decisions.

The challenge for the town hall is to weigh up the need for growth - and the inevitable impossibility of pleasing everyone all the time - with the demand for a wider public debate about the city centre, as more and more people feel they have a stake in its future.